To me, pre-production is an invaluable part of the recording process which can make or break a track – essentially allowing an outsider (ie someone who’s not in the band and who hasn’t previously been involved in neither the writing nor rehearsing of the material) to advise on any polishing or fine-tuning that needs to be done, in order to make tracking as pain-free as possible. When a band is ‘caught up in the moment’, sometimes the most obvious of mistakes can get overlooked – anything from timing and phrasing issues to song structure and arrangement oversights. Without pre-production, problems can make their way in to the live room, creating both headaches and wasted studio time.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous article on preparing for your recording session, it pays dividends  to invest some time away from the rehearsal room in a quieter environment, to really make sure that everyone is one hundred percent confident with their parts and that everyone’s parts are working together to achieve the desired overall sound. If you’re serious about getting it right, I highly recommend hiring a pre-production studio for a few hours. These are generally larger-than-average rehearsal rooms with premium quality equipment installed, which makes for a more pleasurable listening experience. Some even have basic recording facilities (such as an audio CD writer) which are worth taking advantage of. You do pay a premium for this service but it may just well pay for itself in studio time saved from having to make last minute changes to a song arrangement.

As a sound engineer/producer working on a project, I would always insist on sitting in on any pre-production session and have an active role in any discussions surrounding the recording. Things I would pay particular attention to during a pre-production session are:

• Is the drum groove consistent throughout like sections (ie verse one and verse two)?
• Is the kick drum pattern and bass guitar locking in at all times?
• When there are breaks or pauses in the song are all musicians stopping at the same point?
• During legato sections are all notes the same length (ie is a minim beat really a minim)?
• If there is only one guitarist in the band and he/she wishes to perform overdubs in the studio, do they know all subsequent parts that need to be recorded?
• Similarly, do any guitar parts need to be ‘double tracked’?

Perhaps one of the biggest considerations however is whether to record to a metronome (also known as a click track). With today’s computer-based recording systems, this opens up a huge array of possibilities (sequencing, tempo-sync’d delays, audio quantisation to name but a few) but this requires the drummer to be comfortable with doing so. I have had bands in the studio eager to record to a metronome not once having rehearsed with one! This ‘give it a go’ attitude might work for some but generally I find only the most seasoned drummers can truly play to a click and still retain groove and feel. In short: If in doubt, steer clear of click tracks – It’s always better to retain a live groove than create a lifeless, sterile recording.

Aside from performance considerations, a great deal of discussion may also be focused on the overall sound of the finished recording. If a studio location hasn’t yet been chosen then this needs to be considered, as the combination of live rooms and equipment will have a dramatic impact on the recording’s finished sound. There may be talks over which guitar/guitar amplifier combinations should be used and even which drum kits/cymbals (if there is a choice), as these will also greatly vary the recorded sound.

The studio can be a nerve-racking and stressful place at the best of times, so to go in with uncertainties just doesn’t make sense. At very least, try and get a half-decent room recording during a rehearsal so that you can listen back when away from the noise. In doing so, only then will you be able to truly evaluate whether you’re ready to step into the studio and give your very best performance.

In Windows XP

• Right-click the ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop
• Select ‘Properties’
• Select the ‘Advanced’ tab

In Windows Vista / Windows 7

• Right-click the ‘Computer’ icon on the desktop
• Select ‘Properties’
• Select ‘Advanced System Settings’ from the left-hand pane

From here you need to click the ‘Settings…’ button in the ’Performance’ section.

Now if you really want to squeeze every last bit of juice from your CPU and GPU you can turn all the visual effects off (the eye candy that has been added to Windows over the years), by selecting the ‘Adjust for best performance’ radio button. However, unless you’re running an antiquated system, you’re really unlikely to notice any real performance benefits from doing this (I used to notice a small performance increase with Nuendo 1 by switching off all the visual enhancements on a 1GHz Pentium III but that was over eight years ago). My personal preference here is to select the ‘Custom:’ radio button and do the following:

1. Untick any item that includes the words ‘animate’, ‘fade’ or ‘slide’. As much as these look nice they’re really not going to help you much with music production
2. Untick ‘Use visual styles on windows and buttons’. This sets the look of Windows to ‘Windows Classic’, which is far less visually intrusive (and takes up fewer pixels to do the same job as Luna or Aero (Window XP’s and Vista/7’s default visual styles).

Next you need to click on the ‘Advanced’ tab. Under the ‘Processor scheduling’ section select the ‘Background services’ radio button. This will ensure that your ASIO stream takes precedence over the running of programs, in theory ensuring a more stable (and glitch free) audio path through your system. Please note that if your Cubase installation shares the same Windows installation as your general day-to-day programs (word processors, media players, web browsers etc) you may notice a slight performance decrease in those programs by doing this.

My final port of call here is usually the ‘Virtual memory’ section. Virtual memory is used when your computer need to access more RAM than is physically available in your system. Windows uses a ‘page file’ system which automatically copies data from RAM to your hard disk to free up memory. By default, Windows controls the size of the page file and dynamically adjusts this depending on your needs. This can lead to your page file becoming fragmented (scattered over various parts of your hard drive). The general recommendation for music making (and any other system-intensive work such as video editing) is to set your system drive’s minimum and maximum page file size to 1 ½ times that of the amount of RAM you have installed. My PC has 4 Gigabytes (GB) RAM installed, so as the dialog box works in Megabytes (MB) we need to a quick calculation. As there are 1024MB in 1GB, I multiply 1024 by 4 (4096) then multiply that by 1.5, which gives me a grand total of 6144MB. To apply this figure to the page file I do the following in Windows 7 (differences may apply in previous versions of Windows):

• Click the ‘Change…’ button under the ‘Virtual memory’ section of the ‘Advanced’ tab
• Untick ‘Automatically manage paging file sizes for all drives
• Select the system drive (Always C: in Windows Vista / Windows 7 but can be labelled differently in Windows XP)
• Select the ‘Custom size:’ radio button
• Enter the same number (6144 in my case) into both the ‘Initial size (MB):’ and ‘Maximum size (MB):’ boxes
• Click the button labelled ‘Set’

From here you need to restart your computer for the settings to take effect. Once restarted, defragment your system drive. This will ensure that your new, permanently-sized page file is in one physical location on your hard drive.

If you want to go further then you can always get down and dirty with the registry. There are many resources out there that will aid you in tightening up the responsiveness of your operating system. If however, you feel a little daunted by that, you may want to try a program such as TweakXP, TweakVista or Tweak7 to do the work for you.

Please note that while every effort has been made to provide clear and accurate information, I cannot be held responsible for any data loss incurred through the misuse of this tutorial. Always ensure that you back up your work before attempting any system-wide changes.

To Cubase Or Not To Cubase?

Having performed many installations of Cubase and Nuendo over the years, I have learnt that generally the computers I install on fall into the following three categories:

1. General use PC – Your average PC used for everything from playing games to word processing to surfing the internet. Usually has a ton of junk on that isn’t really needed (a personal bugbear of mine are those web toolbars that get included with free applications and add-ons) and has a single physical hard drive with only one partition.
2. Semi-optimised music PC – A PC with one physical hard drive installed but split into two or more partitions. Has two installations of Windows (selectable on startup via the Windows Boot Manager) – One for general computing and one purely for music making.
3. Fully-optimised music PC – A PC with two or more physical hard drives (one for the Windows installation, primed exclusively for music making and one or more for audio data/samples etc).

While all three are capable of running Cubase, you would certainly have a much leaner system (faster boot time, much higher level of responsiveness and generally less ‘clutter’) installing with setup 2 or 3.  I always recommend installing Cubase on a ‘clean’ Windows setup, whether it is on a separate physical hard disk or not. Internal hard drives for desktop PCs are pretty cheap these days and are a worthy investment in my opinion. Laptop users however are often restricted to just the one internal hard drive due to space constraints and would therefore have no choice but to partition.

At home, my ‘general use’ installation of Windows 7 has over sixty(!) listed programs installed in the ‘Programs and Features’ section of ‘Control Panel’. OK, so admittedly that is quite excessive (in my defence I’m a web designer so have multiple browsers installed etc) but I wouldn’t dream of then installing Cubase on top of all that and expect it to work at its optimum. Instead, I have a separate installation of Windows XP with only Cubase and my plugins installed, which makes for a much more pleasurable an experience.

If installing hard drives and multiple copies of Windows seems a little daunting, there are hundreds of tutorials and walk-throughs available online that deal with those matters. Before attempting anything like this however, I always recommend backing up all your data to an external source, just in case the very worst happens.

Once you have Windows up and running there are still a few more tweaks that can be done to the operating system. To learn about them read my article on how to tweak Windows.

While an eight or ten hour day may seem like a long stretch in the studio, time does in fact pass surprisingly fast. With this in mind it pays to be as organised as possible.

Here are some basic things to consider…

1. Know Your Songs

I know this is an obvious one but I’ve been in situations before where the band I’ve been working with has started tracking a song without having written the ending! We literally had to stop recording while they finished writing it! There have also been bands who have been all too keen to get their latest creation down – although not everyone had finished writing their parts. ‘Blagging’ or ‘winging’ it rarely works – I have witnessed some happy accidents but these are few and far between and in the long run it’s best not to leave the recording process down to luck.

You should be well rehearsed. In fact that’s an understatement – You should be rehearsed to the point that you’ve played through the songs so many times you can’t stand to play them any more, your fingers are blistered and bleeding yet you can not only perform the tracks with your eyes closed (easy enough for the vocalist but guitarists not so!), you can perform them with your hands tied behind your back whilst running a gauntlet of burning axes… OK maybe I went a little too far there but you get the picture! :) Before my very first studio session I was made to play the same song over and over for an entire day. Whilst at the time I couldn’t understand the benefit of doing this, in hindsight it paid off as the resultant recording had an air of confidence about it there otherwise wouldn’t have been; with each repetition our performances grew stronger.

2. Know Your Parts

- and know each other’s parts. I’ve worked with bands that have spent weeks and months writing and rehearsing their material in a room, where they couldn’t hear what each other were playing over the drummer. Totally oblivious to the fact that each band member was essentially playing a completely different song, it was a real revelation hearing themselves back through the studio monitors for the first time! The two guitarists were playing mismatched chords and each musician played their own accents and stops where they saw fit. The resulting sound was a complete mess!

Again – basic stuff – but it pays to sit down at some point and make sure that everyone’s parts are working together to create the desired overall sound. Just simple things like where pauses happen (is it on beat three or beat four?) and the length of the guitar solo (if during rehearsals and live performances it tends to get extended by an unknown quantity). Also it’s a good time to consider subtle things like dynamics and ensure that everybody’s syncopated rhythms are really tight. If not, it may well benefit rehearsing a little more in a well-equipped rehearsal room – possibly with the aid of a metronome (more about that in another article).

3. Be Realistic With Your Allotted Time

An eight hour day doesn’t mean eight hours of recording time! In reality, once you’ve loaded in, set up, let the sound engineer do his or her bit (perfect time to put the kettle on!) and sound checked, you can already be an hour and a half in to your session. Factor in mixing and mastering (which shouldn’t really be performed at the end of a day’s recording, but more on that in another article) and you’re probably left with just over three hours to get everything down.

The other main consideration is track length. You’d be hard-pushed to record and mix two six-minute tracks to a reasonable quality in one day, but two three-minute tracks is perfectly doable. The extra time needed to perform and mix those extra minutes soon mounts up over the day, so any prog masterpieces you should really dedicate a whole day to (at the very least). As for tracks of over six minutes (I’ve worked on a couple of nine-minuters in the past!) the time needed seems to go up exponentially due to their often more complex arrangements and therefore tracking and mixing times.